[Paraview] Comparison of Visit and ParaView development

[David E DeMarle]

Dear ParaView programmers,

> ... there seems to be no active developers community except for two or
> three kitware employees.
>

git shortlog 39fb355b..37d222b6 | grep "):" | wc -l
32
granted, most of those who committed between v5.0.0 and v5.1.0.rc1 were
from kitware, but 10x more than 3 active developers.

Questions on this list are at the most basic level, and nobody seems to be
> able to answer, who isn't working for kitware.
>

Try paraview-developers list for paraview development questions.

We would of course like for all questions to be answered and we can
certainly do a better job at it but the fact is that everyone is of course
very busy. Kitware of course offers paid support if you need a guarantee
that your questions will be answered.


> My impression is that ParaView has grown so complicated over the years
> that it is no longer usable as a framework for parallel visualization
> development. Only the ParaView application itself is still frequently used.
> On the other hand, Visit seems to have overtaken ParaView in all aspects.
> Most important is the high quality documentation and very active community,
> scalability is now as good as ParaView, and collaborative web visualization
> is coming rapidly.
>

Both VisIt and ParaView are very good - and free! If you watch them both
long enough, over time you will see that at any given point one is better
at some things than the other, and that over time the specific things
(stability, HPC installation base, scalability, ease of use, documentation,
applicability to scientific domain X, etc) change as they both improve,


>
> What is your opinion? Are there any points, where ParaView is clearly
> advantageous over Visit? Or is it used by most people only out of
> convenience, because they have always worked with ParaView?
>

I leave the opinion about what is currently better about each tool to those
who know them both better than I.

I will agree that people use ParaView mostly out of convenience. But the
same thing goes for VisIt. Same thing goes for operating systems and text
editors for that matter. Once you invest the time to become an expert at
something, you are naturally loathe to bear with the frustration of
starting over.


> Given the horribly out of date books on ParaView and parallel VTK
> development, web documentation mixing three major versions without stating
> which version is referred to, and the dead development discussions I don't
> see any possibility of learning ParaView programming today. Which material
> do you use for tutorials and documentation?
>
>
We should certainly do a better job at documenting ParaView. We really
really do want to increase the developer pool.

But alas, good developing training material takes a lot of time to put
together and there aren't all that many people who want and need  advanced
ParaView material. The people who know a lot are always very busy trying to
making it better at X and don't have a lot of time to help other people
learn to know a lot.

The best way to learn is looking at the code, studying the on-line and in
source examples, asking politely on the mailing list, and taking the time
to get over the learning curve.


> Thank you
> Sven
>
>
Hope that helps.


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